


o' lady bright

by corleones



Category: 18th & 19th Century CE RPF, 19th Century CE RPF, Artists RPF, Desperate Romantics, Historical RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-26
Updated: 2011-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-28 04:23:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/303686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corleones/pseuds/corleones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of images between lovers; He loses the rest of her in between lovers and heady rushes of alcohol and black flashes of light.</p>
            </blockquote>





	o' lady bright

He thinks of her in patches, afterwards, picturing a turn of the cheek, the frame of her body in the light still as a statue when she sat for him, a bit of her bright hair, virginal blood splattered over pale thighs the first time he entered her, brief, lucid flashes of her in parts but never the whole, the full figure.

Never fully Lizzie.

He loses the rest of her in between lovers and heady rushes of alcohol and black flashes of light. He empties the rest of her into his memory until one day, he doesn't and this is when he asks for the poems.

Nothing sentimental; a business decision.

-

But that is at the end; we can't start at the end, there's no point in telling a story that way and a story likes this? At the beginning is no good either; take a brief picture, a series of paintings; a girl in a shop, a Shakespearean boy in Deverell's work, a girl letting down her hair, piles of bright red around white shoulders, a promised ring, the slow passage of time (how do you make a painting of that, you ask; the pre Raphaelites are good at their job, a change of seasons in the trees, perhaps) a pair of naked lungs shaking with a cough, a bottle of laudanum, a brush of dull red in a white dress (headless for a moment as the shoulders go in), the open ground - now, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Let me put you somewhere more manageable, a slow Sunday morning in a parlour, a pair of sisters sitting by the window.

"You ought to quit while you still can, Lizzie," warns her sister.

She has only just heard of Ruskin's patronage and has rushed to advise her.

"Oh, what on earth can you mean?"

Lizzie is rocking lazily in a chair, the family cat slinking around her feet. She has not slept; tired eyes, paint splattered fingers and a light bruise on her hip from where Gabriel pressed to eagerly.

"Well, he's never going to marry you if you think you're his competition!"

Her jaw juts forward, in an expression that could be interpreted (and will be) as stubborn but is really one of frustration; "Gabriel is the one who started me on this path!"

"And I'm sure it was very romantic for him, playing at the teacher and you his student," she sniffs, "Leaning over and correcting your drawing and such - but I'm sure he never thought you'd take it seriously. God save, Lizzie!"

"You don't know what you're talking about."

Lizzie rises from her chair, paces. The curtain drops on the scene of two distressed women.

-

Two lovers in the tree now, except the tree is a bed and this is their house (that used to be his and is now shared by two lovers) and she is asleep and he is awake.

This is an uncommon state. Usually, she rises before him, never having been able to shake off shop hours. Gabriel will lie abed till noon easily, except when he is inspired (then, of course, he will not sleep at all).

He is sitting on the end of the bed. He seems to be making a decision. He hesitates in getting up as if he knows the day will bring mistakes though he is not sure what form they will take yet (anger infidelity drunkenness deceit; there is a whole catalogue of sins that he is familiar with that he can choose from) and he wonders if he could recline backwards, back beneath the sheets but he does not follow through.

He stands. He takes the door.

(What Gabriel does not know and what, perhaps Lizzie does not know either is that she resents him for his power more than she ever will for his indiscretions. She resents how much of her happiness and stability rests on the state of their relationship; she resents how his every action can colour that. She resents him for the ills of society and for how easily she thinks he could fix that and how easily he chooses not to.)

Gabriel stares at her supine form in the bed and later, when she is ill, later, when she has left him, later when a thousand indecisions have separated them, he will wish quite simply that he had drawn her once while sleeping.

-

That's all the time we have for you now, reader; let us go back to Gabriel in his study (it is night, to fill in the things you cannot fully see; foggy windows and inky papers, burning candles) and the fragments of Elizabeth Siddal spread out on his desk. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the grieving widower, his housekeeper widening fingers over his shoulders and the pity of society weighing down there. They ask him his philosophy on death and he recites pieces of Purgatorio in the original Latin, though there isn't a thought in his head about the seven circles of hell only bones and cold skin and dirt coated graves.

He picks through the remains. He thinks of his lady, bright and waits for the next spell of darkness to swallow him.

(His lady burns brightest there).


End file.
